He's cleaning up: Yarmouth Port man tidies up town

Thursday

Nov 29, 2007 at 12:01 AMNov 29, 2007 at 7:47 PM

Sixteen car tires. Thirty-year-old rusted beer cans. The fiberglass cap to a pickup truck. An entire rear-end of a car. No, it’s not a log of items found at the dump. It’s a sampling of the debris Stanley Kaczynski has found along the side roads and dead-end streets of Yarmouth.

Jen Ouellette

Sixteen car tires. Thirty-year-old rusted beer cans. The fiberglass cap to a pickup truck. An entire rear-end of a car.

No, it’s not a log of items found at the dump. It’s a sampling of the debris Stanley Kaczynski has found along the side roads and dead-end streets of Yarmouth.

“I moved to Yarmouth about six years ago after I retired,” says Kaczynski, who previously lived in Manchester by the Sea. “At first I was a little frightened about being retired and not having anything to do.”

The former electrical engineer began by volunteering for the Senior Environment Corps before he started cleaning up Yarmouth beaches.

“I realized that my life down here is absolutely wonderful. I’m almost grateful to the town of Yarmouth and the entire Cape for making my life so wonderful and I felt like giving back.”

Kaczynski says he got the most satisfaction from cleaning up trash. He started his cleanup efforts by combing every beach in Yarmouth – and not just picking up big items. Kaczynski gets down and picks up every single gum wrapper and each and every cigarette butt on the beach.

He says it took him about eight hours to clean up Bass River Beach and about four to clean up the rest of the beaches in town.

After his success at the beaches, Kaczynski quit the SEC to focus all his efforts on cleaning up trash.

“Seeing trash on the roadside gets me upset and rather than complain to somebody about it I just pick it up. So that’s my philosophy.”

Kaczynski’s job isn’t easy. “The trash throwers of the world don’t make it easy. They throw their beer cans and trash into the briar bushes and such.”

He doesn’t have a grabber or any sort of tool to spear the trash. He picks it up all by hand. “It’s a real workout. I come home covered with sweat and covered with dirt, but I don’t mind.”

“We think what he is doing to keep the town image a positive one is great and we appreciate his help,” Xiarhos says.

Xiarhos first met Kaczynski when he turned in a bag of trash he found on a main roadway.

“I was driving down Buck Island Road in the middle of the day and there was this big bag of trash in the middle of the road so I picked it up and looked through it. It was all pizza boxes, soda pop cans and a receipt for the pizza and the address of the person where the pizza was delivered,” says Kaczynski.

He brought the bag to the police department hoping an officer would at least make a phone call to the family.

Kaczynski doesn’t think any action was taken in that particular case. Xiarhos says, however, that there are steep fines involved with littering.

“The fine for improperly dumping trash can be up to $10,000 and can also include seizure of the vehicle involved, depending on the amount of trash illegally dumped.”

Kaczynski hopes the people responsible for littering feel embarrassed for their actions, but he isn’t going to waste time in exposing them – he’s got much loftier goals.

“My goal for the year, which I’m going to start very soon, is to clean up the entire Route 6A stretch in Yarmouth, which is approximately six miles,” says Kaczynksi.

Last spring, Kaczynski tackled a smaller portion of Route 6A and collected about 20 bags of trash. “I consider Route 6A a treasure. I really love Route 6A and between the Kings Way driveway and Union Street was a mess.”

- The Register

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